The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (46 page)

Meanwhile, there were other ways to serve. There were schoolgirls to tend to and anxieties to calm, with Mrs. Moore expecting a German invasion of the Kilns any day and bomb alerts becoming a matter of routine. There were honorable civilian roles; in the summer of 1940, after the fall of France, Lewis joined the recently formed Local Defence Volunteers (later called the Home Guard), which meant spending “one night in nine mooching about the most depressing and malodorous parts of Oxford with a rifle.” The real war work for Lewis, however, would be defense of the faith and, nearly as important, defense of the integrity of literary experience. England was under siege from without, but Christianity and Western culture were under siege from within, and that was a battle—a war of attrition for the most part—that Lewis was prepared to fight with every weapon at his disposal. As he put it to Warnie, “I can never forget Tolkien’s Spanish friend who, after having several colleges pointed out to him by name from the roof of the Radder [the Radcliffe Camera], observed with surprise ‘So this was once a Christian country?’”

“I Am a Very Ordinary Layman…”

Lewis had been a Christian for twelve years now, with all the expected peaks and troughs; the war gave him fresh motive for diligence in observing the sacraments and other ordinances of the faith. In October, after much trepidation, he resolved to make his first confession, the Anglican principle being that “none must, all may, some should” confess privately to a priest. This “auricular” confession was a significant step beyond the General Confession that is a regular part of the liturgy, and Lewis worried that it might make him morbidly self-concerned. Fortunately, he found an able and holy confessor in Fr. Walter Adams of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist (the “Cowley Fathers”), the Anglican Benedictine community founded in 1865 by Richard Meux Benson as part of the Anglo-Catholic revival.

Having adopted Father Adams as his spiritual director, Lewis began to go regularly for confession to the Cowley Fathers’ motherhouse in Oxford or to the Anglo-Catholic Church of St. Mary Magdalen (known at the time as the “highest church in Oxford”). Although Tolkien gives him no credit for this, Lewis had a strong sense of the unique power and authority of the priest to provide spiritual direction and instruction. To Mary Neylan, his former pupil and friend who regularly poured her troubles into his ear, he expressed doubts about the appropriateness of anyone, other than a priest or doctor, being “told too many of his neighbour’s secrets—unless, of course, there is some desperate need.” Yet Lewis never identified with the Anglo-Catholic movement, which he pillories in the character of Neo-Angular in
The Pilgrim’s Regress
, and in recommending Father Adams as confessor to Mrs. Neylan, he qualified his praise with a single misgiving: that the holy priest was “much too close to Rome.”

Nonetheless, Anglo-Catholic influences continued to come his way, one of the most important being his friendship with Sister Penelope Lawson, a nun of the Anglican Community of Saint Mary the Virgin in Wantage, about fifteen miles from Oxford. Sister Penelope first wrote to Lewis in 1939, upon reading
Out of the Silent Planet
, in which she found “bits … more lovely and more satisfying than anything I have met before.” Lewis thanked her but pointed out that she had placed him on the horns of a dilemma: “Do I become more proud in trying to resist or in frankly revelling in, the pleasure it gives me?” There is no record of her response, but having spent twenty-seven years in a convent, Sister Penelope would have been familiar with the struggle for humility and the many traps set by pride. While never ceasing to laud Lewis’s literary efforts, she seemed to be interested primarily in doing what she could to enhance her new correspondent’s spiritual life. She sent him copies of her books, which he admired for “the avoidance of that curious
drabness
which characterizes so many ‘little books on religion,’” and, more surprisingly, a photograph of a popular Catholic icon, the Shroud of Turin, a linen cloth venerated by those who believe that it bears the image of the crucified Christ. Lewis’s initial response was guarded, but soon he warmed to the gift, declaring that “it has grown upon me wonderfully … the great value is to make one realize that He was a man, and once even a dead man. There is so much difference between a doctrine and a realisation.” He framed the picture and placed it in his bedroom; Sister Penelope was awakening something within him.

As their correspondence blossomed, the two exchanged letters on philology, angelology, dogma and doctrine, the nature of Hell, and a hundred other topics. Perhaps because Sister Penelope dwelled in the cool calm cloisters of prayer rather than the stormy trenches of academic dispute, Lewis opened up to her as he had to few others. She became, for some years, his confidante: it was to her that he expressed his worry that in going to confession he was “merely indulging in an orgy of egoism,” a concern assuaged, if not erased, by the event itself: “Well—we have come through the wall of fire and find ourselves (somewhat to our surprise) still alive and even well. The suggestion about an orgy of egoism turns out, like all the enemy propaganda, to have just a grain of truth in it, but I have no doubt that the proper method of dealing with that is to continue the practice, as I intend to do.” To her he bared his heart about household troubles (“things are so bad at home that I’m cancelling several of my R.A.F. engagements”), lectured to the junior sisters of her community for Easter, critiqued her writings, and sent her the manuscript of his new novel,
Perelandra
. He dedicated the novel to “Some Ladies at Wantage,” which in the Portuguese translation became, to Sister Penelope’s delight, “To some wanton ladies.” Lewis revealed to this writer-nun, who shared a common theological vocabulary, his views on how to persuade readers (through the imagination, especially when dealing with children) and, importantly, on the spiritual foundations of art. As the years passed, the exchange of ideas became more irregular, the letters briefer, but the deep affection between scholar and nun never ceased.

More tantalizing than Lewis’s Anglo-Catholic affinities, but difficult to assess, is the question of whether he was tempted to become a Roman Catholic. According to Guy Brinkworth, a Jesuit who claimed to have corresponded with Lewis during the 1940s but failed to save the letters, Lewis “time and again asked specifically for prayers that God might give him ‘the light and grace to make the final gesture.’” Brinkworth reports that Lewis went so far as to ask in a postscript to one of his letters for “prayers that the prejudices instilled in me by an Ulster … nurse might be overcome.”

He did, to some degree, shed those prejudices. His first postconversion book,
The Pilgrim’s Regress
, was free enough of overt anti-Catholic sentiment to make some readers suspect, misinterpreting the figure of Mother Kirk, that Lewis was defending the claims of Rome. Not in the least, he insisted;
The Pilgrim’s Regress
was “intended to be a general apologetic allegory for ‘all who profess and call themselves Christians,’” a phrase aptly taken from the Collect “For All Sorts and Conditions of Men” in the Book of Common Prayer. The position he took, in addressing himself to all sorts and conditions of men, was not generic Christianity, but Anglicanism through and through, for he saw the Anglican Church as the custodian of all that was best in historic Christianity. As he put it in
The Allegory of Love
: “When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide
religio
of amulets and holy places and priestcraft; Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes.” Anglicanism, he believed, avoided both kinds of decadence. As an Anglican, one could be Catholic without idolatry, Protestant without impoverishment, and orthodox where it really mattered, admitting as true “that which has been believed everywhere, always, by everyone” (a formula Lewis liked to cite, from the
Commonitory
of the fifth-century saint Vincent of L
é
rins).

To an American Episcopalian who was feeling attracted to Catholicism, Lewis spelled out his position, identifying as authentically Catholic “the vast mass of doctrine wh. I find agreed on by Scripture, the Fathers, the Middle Ages, modern R.C.’s, modern Protestants” but rejecting the Roman Church “where it differs from this universal tradition” (e.g., with regard to Mary, the papacy, and the metaphysics of transubstantiation) as constituting “as much a provincial or local
variation
from the central, ancient tradition as any particular Protestant sect is.” David Soper recalled Lewis saying in an interview not long before his death that “the difficulty with joining the Roman Church was that you were, so to speak, ‘buying a pig in a poke’; you could not possibly know at what hours something new would be added, as essential for salvation, to the worship of Christ as God and Saviour.” As a communicant of the Church of England, Lewis believed one could live the full ecclesial and sacramental life, receive Christ fully present in the Eucharist, pray for the dead, go to confession, and submit to the teaching authority of bishops without having to accept newly minted dogmas like the Immaculate Conception.

There was also spiritual benefit in staying at one’s post: as a member of the national church one could be ordinary and unpretentious, worship with one’s neighbors in the local parish (whether high church or low—Lewis’s parish in Headington was a mix), and leave the fine points of ecclesiology to experts. “There is no mystery about my own position,” Lewis wrote in his introduction to
Mere Christianity
; “I am a very ordinary layman of the Church of England, not especially ‘high,’ nor especially ‘low,’ nor especially anything else.” All the evidence confirms that this is exactly what he was, and without any prolonged anxiety as to whether he should become more Catholic or even Roman Catholic. Now that Britain was at war, and all the goods of civilization under siege, it was comforting and a matter of pride to be able to speak, as he repeatedly did, of “my church, the Church of England.” As a literary scholar and writer, moreover, Lewis felt he could be imaginatively Catholic, like Spenser, without any thought of submitting to Rome. Wasn’t that the whole fun of reading and writing allegory? Allegory often
looks
Catholic, for Catholicism abounds in symbols and images; but the presence of Catholic imagery is no proof of a longing for Roman collars. Quite the contrary, Lewis says: “only a bungler, like Deguileville, would introduce a monastery into his poem if he were really writing about monasticism.” Perhaps Lewis protested too much; but it was a constant vexation that people either suspected him of Popish leanings or demanded to know why he was not yet a confirmed Roman Catholic. At Oxford there were rumors that he was not only a closet Catholic but a secret Jesuit—but the many Catholics among Lewis’s friends (Tolkien, Hardie, Havard, Griffiths, Fr. Gervase Mathew, Dundas-Grant) and pupils (George Sayer, Christopher Derrick) knew better. “Jack, most of your friends seem to be Catholic. Why don’t you join us?” Havard would ask, but to no avail.

13

MERE CHRISTIANS

Sales of
The Pilgrim’s Regress
had fallen short of expectations, but the book had caught the eye of the Christian publisher Ashley Sampson, who invited Lewis just before the war to contribute a volume on suffering for the “Christian Challenge” series he was editing for the Centenary Press. This would be the real beginning of Lewis’s career as a Christian evangelist. He submitted
The Problem of Pain
under his favorite pseudonym, Nat Whilk (from
n
á
t-hwilc
, “I know not who,” used in Old English as the indefinite pronoun, e.g., “someone”), but at the publisher’s insistence the book appeared in 1940 under his own name. He dedicated it to the Inklings, to whom he had read chapters as they emerged from his pen; the notes Havard had been reading to Inklings meetings on mental and physical pain appeared as an appendix. While writing the book, Lewis was treating himself with Veganin (paracetamol, codeine, and caffeine) for the sharp pain of a rib injured when he slipped in the bath. Yet
The Problem of Pain—
in contrast to
The Pilgrim’s Regress—
has little that could be called autobiographical. It is refreshingly objective. As he said to Warnie, “If you are writing a book about pain and then get some actual pain as I did from my rib, it does
not
either, as the cynic wd. expect, blow the doctrine to bits, nor, as a Christian wd. hope, turn into practice, but remains quite unconnected and irrelevant, just as any other bit of actual life does when you are reading or writing.”

The Problem of Pain
sets the tone for almost all of Lewis’s evangelizing volumes: it is short, conversational, commonsensical, witty, and bristling with logic that usually hits its mark, while sometimes going wildly astray. Lewis displays his trademark style in the first sentence, making the chattiest of remarks about the most profound of subjects: “Not many years ago when I was an atheist, if anyone had asked me, ‘Why do you not believe in God?’ my reply would have run something like this:…” His answer, in a nutshell, is death, matter, meaninglessness,
pain.
“The creatures cause pain by being born, and live by inflicting pain, and in pain they mostly die … all life will turn out in the end to have been a transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face of infinite matter.” If we come to believe in God, as Lewis did, the problem of pain remains; unknotting it is the purpose of his book.

How do we reconcile human suffering with divine omnipotence and divine goodness? Mostly by understanding these divine attributes in a more clearheaded, rational way—by grasping, for example, that omnipotence does not mean doing the intrinsically impossible (as an example, Lewis imagines God giving and denying creatures free will at one and the same time): “nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.” As for divine goodness, Lewis argues that precisely because God is perfectly good, he wishes us to share in his own perfect, complete, and eternal goodness. God is love, and our highest bliss is to become creatures who can receive this love. But learning to love perfectly is no easy task; pain and suffering are means by which God effects this miraculous transformation. We may revolt at the prospect, but “whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.” We must see ourselves as we really are, and then die to our old selves through obedience and sacrifice. Pain “gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment”—and we are all, to a greater or lesser extent, bad men. Tribulation is the means of redemption and “cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.” That some people will never reform, actively willing their own damnation, is the reason for hell; but for the rest of us heaven awaits, a place or state of which we now know fleeting hints, echoes, glimpses. Here Lewis is referring to his old standard, Joy, which we know as an unquenchable longing for something beyond—beyond our hopes, beyond our ken—that “is the thing I was made for … the secret signature of each soul.”